It’s a fantastic idea, to apply the navigation model of Google Maps to other virtual representations of atoms and bits. I include ‘bits’ because Zoomii will no doubt extend to MP3 downloads and ebooks, which have no real-world equivalent. I’m slowly reading Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. I wonder how he feels about a virtual representation of the space-limited physical world? Besides the obvious retail goods, what else could we Zoomiize? Voting records for Members of Parliament?
As I zipped around the Canadian version of Zoomi, I note that an author named Stephenie Meyer has no less than five books in the top 20 bestsellers on Amazon.ca. Can I get a WTF? They’re apparently vampire love sagas for the young adult crowd. Them kids–no accounting for taste.
If you’re a regular Flickr user with Creative Commons-licensed photos, you’ve probably received a request from NowPublic to use one of your photos. I think this is a great application of the crowd-sourcing model, and they’ve got it 90% correct. I sent a feature request to NowPublic on the subject, and thought I’d share it here:
I’ve received a couple of recent requests to integrate Flickr photos into news stories. I’m happy to receive and approve them. However, your current setup obliges me to create a NowPublic account and subsequently log in every time I want to approve a photo (I’m not comfortable uniformly approving all future requests. That’s a pain point I could do without.
Philosophically, I think the question is ‘who’s doing whom a favour?’ The login implies that NP is doing me a favour by publishing my photo. I feel the opposite, that I’m doing NP a favour by permitting you to use my photo. If we work from my assumption, then it behooves NP to make the act of approval as effortless as possible.
Do you think I got this right? Or am I just whinging, and should be grateful for being asked to share my photos? And should that be ‘whom’ or ‘who’? I never committed the associated grammar rule to memory.
I’ve recognized that, personally, I feel quite differently about my photos on Flickr than I do about, say, this blog. While I strive to improve my work on this site, I feel much more ambivalent about my Flickr photos.
Flickr is really just a handy place to put and reference my photos. While I used to obsess about the visitor stats for this site, I almost never check the number of views that my photos have. It’s strictly a question of personal taste, but it’s probably that apathy that’s motivating this feature request.
I just got an email from an old colleague. He’s just launched Inhabit Street. Here’s the blurb:
for apartment buildings, condos and townhouses, inhabit street is a website for your community.
it’s a place for you to meet your neighbours, manage your strata and find out what’s going on in your neighbourhood..
Yes, I’m troubled by the lack of capitalization, too.
At our last apartment building, the building manager actually had set up a robust website with useful stuff like guest suite applications, policies and so forth. Additionally, he set up an old-school forum where people could talk about issues (Why do we have a beach volleyball court? Who keeps letting their dog poo in it?).
I do see a lot of potential competition for this kind of service. Sites like Facebook, obviously, as well as Ning. The trick will be delivering enough task-specific additional value that you wouldn’t get in a general purpose social network.
This is strictly my personal taste, but when I lived in a skyscraper I didn’t want to know my neighbours. I clung to the anonymity like a gecko. That’s still true in our five-suite heritage house here in Victoria, but trickier to execute.
When Twitter–the popular microblogging platform–is down for the count (something that’s been happeninga lot lately), they display this charming image on their website:
I think it’s quite lovely, in a surreal sort of way. And it always struck me as a bit existential. I started to wonder about those eight little birds, and how they must feel about their workload. So, I made this 2-minute video, which features the worst animation you’ve ever seen:
Apologies for my pitiful reading–I’m an awful actor. An actress friend of ours, Mercedes Dunphy, was in town for the weekend, so I got her to do the other voice. She raises the bar considerably. I lifted the opening lines from the seminal first episode of Red vs. Blue, and stole a couple of other lines from Waiting for Godot. There’s also a Douglas Adams reference which, given the presence of a plummeting sperm whale, seemed like a must.
I was a little disappointed by the way both Vimeo and YouTube processed this video. YouTube wouldn’t remotely keep the audio and animation synchronized, and Vimeo cut out the open three seconds of video (hence the overlapping groans), which shows the whale image above to aid with context. I’m pretty new to this video stuff–any recommendations as to how I can upload this to a video-sharing site without it getting all bollocksed up?
Over dinner, Julie and I were musing about setting up a mutual friend. We scanned our brains for other friends and acquaintances who are single.
Recognizing the shortcomings of my brain, I figured Facebook might do a good job of standing in. I poked around a bit, but didn’t immediately find what I was looking for.
I turned to Google, and discovered the Facebook app Most Eligible Singles. It looks pretty silly, but once you add it, there’s an option on the app page to show your single friends. I have shockingly few, particularly of the female variety. Of the 465 Facebook ‘friends’ (take that term with a Dead Sea’s worth of salt) there are only 17 females who are declared as ’single’. And only six of those are in Vancouver.
After a little more looking, I eventually found the Facebook profile search, where you can filter on any profile variable. However, the results don’t seem to easily discriminate between your immediate friends, and friends of friends. So, it’s sub-optimal.
Something that Todd said in a comment on that post resonated:
I found myself thinking that broadcast was the wrong word for twitter, as it tends to start working more like IM over time, only not as isolated.
Looking back at my Twitter stream, most of my tweets (I’m still displeased by that word) are replies to other people, or links to something. I’m not sure why, but I’m disinclined to post tweets that answer the default Twitter question, “what are you doing?”
21st Century IRC
I used to hang out in a Skype channel that included 30 or 40 Vancouverites from the tech community. I’d let in run in the background, and remark on some tech news or bemoan the Canucks as the mood struck me. Twitter has replaced that as a kind of 21st century IRC.
I have a link blog in the sidebar of this site. It’s a kind of clearing house for stuff that interests me, but doesn’t merit a full post on my site. A couple hundred people subscribe to it, and I really don’t know how useful people find it (I’ve never asked).
Now every time I spot a link I’d like to pass on (such as this blog of things that look like a duck), I have to decide whether it goes in Twitter, in the link blog, or both. Both takes too long, and I have yet to develop criteria for what goes where.
I asked, on Twitter, about just streaming my link blog into my Twitter stream, but I got a couple of negative responses. Understandably, people (presumably they were link blog subscribers) didn’t want to get repeated content. When I first signed up for Twitter many moons ago, I did that with my blog’s RSS feed, and somebody told me it wasn’t kosher.
They’re probably right–I find little value in tweets that read “New Blog Post: http://www.verysmallurl.com/fdfdla”. If I want to read your blog, I probably already subscribe to it. Obviously the etiquette on all this stuff is still emerging.
The number of people I follow is up from 33 to 58. The increase is mostly due professional interest (I’m following some top tech bloggers). I tend to give people a trial run, and if I find what they’re writing about interesting, I stick with them.
No Debate Team at This High School
The major frustration that I’ve found on Twitter is that it inhibits debate. I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to have a cogent argument that doesn’t devolve into sound bites on the platform. I love debate–it’s one of the reasons I spend leisure time online. Twitter seems to act a bit like high school in this regard–either people hurl insults or just talk nice (I know high schools have debate teams, but that’s where my analogy breaks down).
So, the experiment continues. Any suggestions on how I should handle the link blog vs. Twitter issue?
Via TechCrunch, TripKick is thin-slicing hotel reviewing on the web. Instead of just reviewing hotels (far too vague!), TripKick offers user-generated reviews of individual hotel rooms. It’s kind of the hotel room equivalent of SeatGuru:
Tripkick.com is designed to make your hotel experience an effortless one. We prepare you with the little known facts about each hotel room so you can make an educated decision when choosing your perfect room.
Each hotel page on our site offers a variety of helpful information. You can use us before you’ve chosen your hotel, or once you’ve already booked your reservation.
Here’s a sample page, for the the San Francisco Fairmont. The site has a nice aesthetic, though I have serious objections to the way they abbreviate headings. If you check out the ‘Compare Rooms’ tab, they have a table which includes column headings like “GREAT BATHRM” or “OVERSZ”. I may just be an old grammarian, but I miss those vowels.
Rick Segal is a venture capitalist (we almost never write that out) in Toronto. He recently received a business plan in Microsoft Word format (a no-no in the first place, I’d imagine). The genius authors of the plan failed to ‘Accept All Changes’ in Word, thus enabling Rick to view a bunch of their comments in the document. A few gems:
Scratched out “Exchange sucks resources like a vampire in heat”, replaced with “Exchange is resource intensive under certain scenarios”
“Segal used work for Microsoft so skip the name dropping, save it for the afternoon meeting, they are clueless about Redmond.”
“When you talk through this point on your slides, make Chanukah jokes, he is Jewish and will get them”
Make Chanukah jokes? That’s easier said than done. “Hey, uh, if we get our funding near the end of the year, maybe we could get it in eight parts?”
Here’s a simple rule to avoid this phenomenon in the future: PDF that mofo.
Yesterday I gave three talks. In the morning, I gave a relatively standard “Social Media 101″ keynote at DocTrain West (thanks for having me, Scott). Anne posted her notes from that talk.
As I’ve said before, I like to keep my accompanying slides bullet point-free. On each slide, you either get an image, a diagram or a few words per slide. Here are my slides from yesterday’s talk, which are pretty much inscrutable without, well, me.
Why do I take that approach?
It ensures that I’ve written a speech or at least an outline outside of the slides. I’ve said this before too, but just because you’ve made slides doesn’t mean you’ve written a speech.
Images become metaphors, and metaphors are excellent teaching tools. I’m currently reading the excellent Made to Stick, and the authors are constantly reinforcing this idea.
My slides look different from nearly everybody else’s. That makes me (and hopefully my ideas) more memorable. Lots of my fellow speaker had terrific ideas, but their slides were, for the most part, banal and full of bullet points. See for yourself. Remember, your slides are your costumes, lighting and set. So do them up nice.
I try to pick beautiful photos. They’re a pleasure to look at. Even if audience members couldn’t care less about my talk, at least there’s something visually interesting going on.
After my talk somebody thanked me for being a bullet point-free zone.
Casual, Friendly and Open
In the afternoon, I was running a workshop on social media tools, channels and technology. It was towards the end of the last day of the conference, and I figured everybody would be a bit bored of PowerPoint presentations.
Instead, I prepared an informal, conversational session around this tag cloud:
As I explain in the talk, I’m actually cheating here. The size of the terms have no application. It’s just a fun, topical way to make a list. The subtextual message is casual, friendly and open.
Sometimes I print these tag clouds out, as in the above photo. Props are usually a good thing, and it’s always fun to have something to wave around.
I put this list up on the screen, and invite people to ask about any of the terms, or to tell stories about their experiences. I prepare by devising little riffs and case study on each term.
It’s certainly not a particularly original or innovative approach, but I find people respond to it in a workshop or other less formal session. The tag cloud provides just enough structure to keep the conversation on track, and enables me to refocus or refresh the topic as necessary.
Plus, it’s more fun for me. I get to learn more from the audience, and the randomness of it keeps me on my toes. In a way, it’s a kind of rip-off of 30 Plays in 60 Minutes.
I really enjoyed “The Bourne Identity” when I first saw it in the theatre (here’s an early, rambling blog post on the film). I also really wanted Matt Damon’s sweater. He wears this kick-ass black, military-style sweater in the film. Of course, he looks way better than I would in it, but that’s also true of togas, house coats and djellabas.
At the time, I imagined a website which tracked what actors wore in movies, and sold real-world equivalents which you could buy. This was back in 2002, and I remember searching for a website that filled that role. I couldn’t find much. I did a few quick searches today, and still didn’t find anything super promising. SeenOn.com looks like the right fit, but it lists all of three movies thus far.
CoolSpotters has the potential to become such a resource, though it seems more targeted at off-screen It Girl bollocks. I read about it today on TechCrunch:
It’s an eye-candy celebrity-focused site that shows users the products celebrities are wearing in various photos. Users can then talk about and, of course, purchase those items.
Users can track celebrities, products, brands, shows (TV, Movies, etc.), places, events, and more. The idea is to show connections between people and stuff. These connections are called “spots” (as in, “I spotted that”), and show details on the item. If something is incorrect, users can change or remove it, and add new people and things.
They kind of combine the crowd-sourcing of Wikipedia and Facebook tags (or Flickr notes, if you like) with the smarmy photos of gossip blogs. It’s a smart approach.
